Resurrecting the Czar

In Russia, the recent discovery of the remains of the two missing Romanov children has pitted science against the church

Valentin Gribenyuk trudges ahead of me through a birch and pine forest outside Yekaterinburg, Russia, waving oversize mosquitoes from his neck and face. The woods close in around us as we follow a trail, stepping over rotting tree trunks and dark puddles. “Right here is the Old Koptyaki Road,” he says, pointing to a dirt and gravel path next to a gas pipeline. “This is where the assassins drove their truck.” We stop at a spot where nine timbers are embedded in the ground. A simple wooden cross stands vigil. “The bodies were found buried right [at the site marked by] these planks.”

From This Story

In July 2007, a team working with Valentin Gribenyuk, shown here at the Yekaterinburg burial site, made a stunning discovery when they uncovered remains later determined to be those of the czar's son, Alexie, and daughter Maria.
(Kate Brooks)

Planks mark the location where a grave containing the czar and the other family members was found in 1979. The Russian Orthodox Church does not accept the identification of the bodies found there, insisting that the bodies were incinerated at nearby Ganina Yama.
(Kate Brooks)

Many Russians regard the Romanovs, canonized by the Orthodox Church in 2000, as martyrs as this monarchist displays with their images.
(Kate Brooks)

The whereabouts of the remains of the czar and his family, shown here in a 1914 portrait, had puzzled investigators since 1918. From left are Olga, Nicholas II, Anastasia, Alexi, Tatiana and standing are Maria and Alexandra.
(Bettmann / Corbis)

Anastasia's skull being examined.
(Reuters / Corbis)

A bone fragment from Alexei.
(U.S. Department of Defense)

After, investigator Alexander Avdonin (second from left) uncovered the truth about the Romanov remains - and kept his findings a then kept it secret for a decade.
(Dr. Michael D. Coble, PhD)

Yekaterinburg's Church on the Blood was built on the site of the killings.
(Kate Brooks)

Each July 17, the anniversary of the royal family's murder, religious services are conducted at Yekaterinburg's Church of the Blood.
(Kate Brooks)

After the service, clerics walk several miles to Ganina Yama, where the church still maintains the bodies are buried. The czar's "tragic end," says the Rev. Belovolov, "could not leave any sane person indifferent."
(Kate Brooks)

Interest in a return to the monarchy persists. Proponents include Georgy Fyodorov, head of the Russian Imperial Union, a royalist group founded in 1929.
(Kate Brooks)

Artist Xenia Vyshpolskaya specializes in portraits of the czars and is a proponent of the return to the monarchy.
(Kate Brooks)

Princess Vera Obolensky, at her home in St. Petersburg, moved to Russia three years ago from Paris. She claims descent from Ivan the Terrible, who reigned from 1533 to 1584, and laments the end of royal rule: "The monarchy was brutally put to an end," she says, "and it was a tragedy for Russia."
(Kate Brooks)

A scene from outside of the Russian Orthodox Church on the Blood, built in 2000-2003 on the site where the former Czar Nicholas II of Russia and several members of his family and household were executed following the Bolshevik Revolution.
(Kate Brooks)

Worshippers at the night-long service at the Church on the Blood that is held on the anniversary of the murder of Czar Nicholas II and his family.
(Kate Brooks)

At the Ganina Yama grounds, the Church constructed the Monastery of the Holy Czarist Passion-Bearers in 2001. Following the morning walk from Church on the Blood, believers pray and kiss the cross that stands next to the edge of the mineshaft.
(Kate Brooks)

Seven chapels were later constructed at the Ganina Yama site, one for each member of the royal family and each dedicated to a particular saint or relic.
(Kate Brooks)

Czar Nicholas II and his family were first imprisoned in the Alexander Palace at Tsarskoye Selo (Czar's Village), which is now a museum where the public can see some of the Romanov’s possessions.
(Kate Brooks)

The Romanov family, and Czar Nicholas II especially, are venerated as martyrs by the Russian Orthodox church.
(Kate Brooks)

Map of burial sites of Czar Nicholas II and family.
(Guilbert Gates)

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Like many Russians, Gribenyuk, a 64-year-old geologist, has long been obsessed with one of Russia’s most infamous crimes. He now finds himself at the center of the latest controversy surrounding the grisly, world-shattering events of July 17, 1918.

Around 2 a.m. on that day, in the basement of a commandeered house in Yekaterinburg, a Bolshevik firing squad executed Czar Nicholas II, his wife, Alexandra, the couple’s five children and four attendants. The atrocity ended imperial rule in Russia and was the signature act of a new Communist regime that would brutalize its citizens for most of the 20th century.

The murder of Czar Nicholas Romanov and his family has resonated through Soviet and Russian history, inspiring not only immeasurable government coverups and public speculation but also a great many books, television series, movies, novels and rumors. Yet if it has been an open secret that the Communists had dispatched the Romanovs, there was genuine mystery, apparently even within the government, concerning the whereabouts of the royal remains.

Then, in May 1979, a handful of scientists searching clandestinely in the woods outside Yekaterinburg, a city of 1.5 million residents 900 miles east of Moscow in the Ural Mountains, found the long-decayed skeletons of nine people, including three children. But the scientists didn’t divulge their secret until 1990, as the USSR teetered toward collapse. As it happened, a powerful new forensic identification method based on DNA analysis was just coming into its own, and it soon showed that the remains of five of the nine persons uncovered were almost certainly those of the czar, his wife and three of their children; the others were the four attendants.

The story, of course, has been widely reported and celebrated as a sign of post-Soviet openness and as a triumph of forensic science. It’s also common knowledge that the Russian Orthodox Church and some prominent Romanov descendants dispute those findings. The church and the royals—both of which were suppressed by the Soviets—are longtime allies; the church, which regarded the czar as a near-divine figure, canonized the family in 2000, and a movement to reinstate the monarchy, though still small, does have its passionate adherents. Ironically, both the church and some in the royal family endorse an older, Soviet recounting of events that holds that the Romanov remains were disposed of elsewhere in the same forest and destroyed beyond recovery. The 1990 forensic findings, they contend, were flawed.

But that became harder to accept after a July day in 2007.

That’s when a team of investigators working with Gribenyuk uncovered the remains of two other Romanovs.

Nicolay Alexandrovich Romanov was born near St. Petersburg in 1868, the son of Crown Prince Alexander and Maria Feodorovna, born Princess Dagmar of Denmark. His father ascended the throne as Alexander III in 1881. That year, when Nicolay was 13, he witnessed the assassination of his grandfather, Alexander II, by a bomb-throwing revolutionary in St. Petersburg. In 1894, as crown prince, he married Princess Alix of Hesse, a grand duchy of Germany, granddaughter of Queen Victoria. Nicholas became czar the same year, when his father died of kidney disease at age 49.

Nicholas II, emperor and autocrat of all the Russias, as he was formally known, reigned uneventfully for a decade. But in 1905, government troops fired on workers marching toward St. Petersburg’s Winter Palace in protest against poor working conditions. About 90 people were killed and hundreds wounded that day, remembered as “Bloody Sunday.” Nicholas didn’t order the killings—he was in the countryside when they took place—and he expressed sorrow for them in letters to his relatives. But the workers’ leader denounced him as “the soul murderer of the Russian people,” and he was condemned in the British Parliament as a “blood-stained creature.”